General

These Washington, D.C. roommates living in Mount Pleasant often use Airbnb to rent out their house while they are away. This time, they returned home to a disaster. Their house guest had thrown a raging party, trashed the place, and stolen thousands of dollars’ worth of clothing, jewelry, and laptop computers. Read the full story, including a statement from Airbnb about the incident, here… http://www.fox5dc.com/news/local-news/270368290-story

Johnson Law Group will be an event sponsor for the January Networking Get-Together of the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. Our firm subscribes to VBSR's mission to "foster a business ethic... that recognizes the opportunity and responsibility of the business community to set a high standard for protecting the natural, human, and economic environments of our citizens." See more at http://vbsr.org/events/vbsr_networking_get_together_hosted_by_magic_hat/

The law affects us in many ways, and in many facets of our lives. Here are a few characterizations of law made by some familiar characters: "Law is order, and good law is good order." - Aristotle "The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom." - John Locke "What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and effort; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature." - Voltaire "Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law." - Immanuel Kant "Common sense often makes good law." William O. Douglas "Law is reason, free from passion." - Aristotle "Law is nothing else but the best reason of wise men applied for ages to the transactions and business of mankind." - Abraham Linclon "That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power." - Aung San Suu Kyi "It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation." - Calvin Coolidge "The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free." - Henry David Thoreau Under the provisions of the HIPAA privacy act, it appears that the adorable pictures of children lining the walls of pediatricians' offices everywhere could constitute a privacy violation. Sometimes it seems that the law could be a bit more nuanced. The New York Times has more: http://nyti.ms/1ovHH3h